Learning and Awareness

“... many people who are unable to either sing or dance explain this by saying that they never learned how. But there are also many who sing and dance naturally...” (ATM p 28)

“Two states of existence are commonly distinguished: waking and sleeping. We shall define a third state: awareness. In this state the individual knows exactly what he is doing while awake... “... the waking state in general more resembles sleep than awareness.” (ATM P 31)

“Awareness is consciousness together with a realization of what is happening within it, or of what is going on within ourselves while we are conscious.” (ATM p 50)

“Awareness fits action to intention.” (ATM p 46)

“Awareness is not essential to life.” (ATM p 47)

“There are ... great periodic variations in the individual’s awareness ant its value relative to other aspects of his personality. There may be a low point at which awareness may disappear momentarily or for a period. More rarely, there may be a high point at which there is a harmoniously unity, with all man’s capacities fused into a single whole. “In the exoteric schools of thought a Tibetan parable is told. According to the story, a man without awareness is like a carriage whose passengers are the desires, with the muscles for horses, wile the carriage itself is the skeleton.l Awareness is the sleeping coachman. As long as the coachman remains asleep the carriage will be dragged aimlessly here and there. Each passenger seeks a different destination and the horses pull different ways. But when the coachman is wide awake and holds the reins the horses will pull the carriage and bring every passenger to his proper destination.In these moments when awareness succeeds in being at one with feeling, senses, movement and thought, the carriage will speed along on the right road. Then man can make discoveries, invent, create, innovate and ‘know’. He grasps that his small world and the great world around are but one and that in this unity he is no longer alone.” (ATM, pp 53-54)

“Man’s life is a continuous process, and the improvement is needed in the quality of the process, not in his properties or disposition.” (ATM p 33)

Learning. Quotes from various sources.

"Learning is finding out what you already know" -- Richard Bach

"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival." --W. Edwards Deming

"The illiterate of the future will not be the person who cannot read. It will be the person who does not know how to learn." --Alvin Toffler

"He who learns but does not think, is lost! He who thinks but does not learn is in great danger." -- Confucius

"All I really need to know about how to live and what to do and how to be I learned in kindergarten. Remember the Dick-and-Jane books and the first word you learned--the biggest word of all--look." --Robert Fulghum

"Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history." --George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

Experience is the child of Thought, and Thought is the child of Action. We cannot learn men from books --Benjamin Disraeli, (1804-1881)

“O! this learning, what a thing it is.” -- Shakespeare, Taming of the Shrew

"There's only one way to have a happy marriage and as soon as I learn what it is I'll get married again." Clint Eastwood

"We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools."-Martin Luther King, Jr.

"If you don't learn to laugh at troubles, you won't have anything to laugh at when you grow old." -Ed Howe

"Live as if your were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever." -Gandhi

"There are no mistakes, no coincidences. All events are blessings given to us to learn from." -Elizabeth Kubler-Ross

"To teach a man how he may learn to grow independently, and for himself, is perhaps the greatest service that one man can do another." -Benjamin Jowett